Doing some research for this blog I was struck by a fact — if you want your Mythos baddie to become iconic, to have thousands of different artists interpreting your words into weird artworks–you’d better be visual. Literally or suggestively.
As a writer of horror you have to decide how much you’re going to show and how much to hide. (The unseen stuff is actually scarier.) Take Frank Belknap Long for instance. He wrote at least three Mythos tales (none of which is my favorite FBL story, that belongs to “Second Night Out” (aka “The Dead Black Thing”) (Weird Tales, May 1934). He first penned “The Space-Eaters” (Weird Tales, July 1928), a tale which includes fictionalized versions of himself and H. P. Lovecraft. The Space-Eaters are reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”, in which the monster remains largely unseen. Only the victim of the Space-Eater’s brain-invasion can really see what they look like:
But when Howard turned and shook his head, I knew that the dim, formless thing that towered above the trees was more than a shadow.
“If we see it clearly, we are lost!” he warned, his voice vibrant with terror. “Pray that it remains without form!”
The reader is cheeering: “See it! See it!” Later when the HPL character gets munched:
In the center of the room, between the ceiling and the floor, the pages whirled about, and the light burned through the sheets, and descending in spiraling shafts entered the brain of my poor friend. Into his head, the light was pouring in a continuous stream, and above, the Master of the light moved with a slow swaying of its entire bulk. I screamed and covered my eyes with my hands, but still the Master moved—back and forth, back and forth. And still the light poured into the brain of my friend.
Creepy “old man trees” and ghostly hands reaching down from the sky. Weird, but what can the artist latch onto? To be fair though, Hugh Rankin knocked it out of the park with his illustration but it never caught on. Here is perhaps the essential Mythos squidgy drawn for the first time….
Frank’s second try was the far more popular “The Hounds of Tindalos” (Weird Tales, March 1929). Oddly, Long spends even less time describing them:
“The Hounds of Tindalos!” he muttered. “They can only reach us through angles. We must eliminate all angles from this room. I shall plaster up all of the corners, all of the crevices. We must make this room resemble the interior of a sphere.”
Killer math monsters. One of Long’s favorite subjects, whether in horror or science fiction, is the fifth dimension. Chalmers, using a drug and some really high-powered algebra goes beyond time. But the hounds are lurking out there and he ends up decapitated and covered in blue pus.
As you can see from the illustration C. C. Senf chickened out from trying to render the weird angular dog monsters and went for the body of a victim. Fortunately, later artists were up to the challenge.
The last Mythos tale is Long’s masterpiece, a lengthy novella called “The Horror From the Hills” (Weird Tales, January and February/March 1931) featuring the elephantine Chaugnar Faugn. Plenty of digressions by mystics explaining about the dimensions, etc. but also some action. Chaugnar is very well described:
“Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal. The pedestal upon which it squatted was of black onyx: the statue itself, with the exception of the tusks, had apparently been chiseled from a single block of stone, and was so hideously mottled and eroded and discolored that it looked, in spots, as though it had been dipped in sanies. The thing sat bolt upright. Its forelimbs were bent stiffly at the elbow, and its hands — it had human hands– rested palms upward on its lap. Its shoulders were broad and square and its breasts and enormous stomach sloped outward, cushioning the trunk. It was as quiescent as a Buddha, as enigmatical as a sphinx, and as malignantly poised as a gorgon or cockatrice. Algernon could not identify the stone out of which it had been hewn, and its greenish sheen disturbed and puzzled him… ”
None of these stories received cover art but at least “The Horror From the Hills” got two illustrations. C. C. Senf draws a pretty standard elephant (above). (Yawn.) His second try is actually of Chaugnar Faugn’s brothers, not him. Reminds me of E. H. Shepard’s dragon from “The Reluctant Dragon”. Fearsome Dave Carson art, it ain’t.
Here’s where Senf got the swipe: H. G. Wells’s article “The Things That Lived on Mars” (Cosmopolitan, March 1908). C. C. reversed the elephantine heads but pretty much stole the whole thing.
Now to the point: a search in Google will quickly produce dozens of Hounds of Tindaloses or Chaugnar Faugns (along with Cthulhu, who outdoes everybody!) Space-Eaters? Nada. Well, maybe one. It’s hard to tell. The lack of a visual hook for the artist, whether pro like Michael Whelan or a cult-figure like Allen Koszowski or even just a doodler who’s running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, the interest is not there for Long’s more subtle Space-Eater. Even the largely undescribed Hound of Tindalos runs circles around it. Chaugnar Faugn is well described and the Hounds have a suggestive name and a cooler idea.
So just a warning. If you want to see your monster on book covers, in illustrations, on DeviantArt or just Google, you’d better describe it somewhat or give it an idea hook. Then you’ll get to see Dave Carson’s pen and ink or Toren Atkinson’s paintbrush bring it to life. And let’s be honest. It’s a hellava thrill…
